Last week’s readings asked the basic question, What does God want from us? We saw that the answer the Prophet Micah gave — to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God — is a pithier version of answers provided in the rest of the Old Testament, which can be summarized … Continue reading The Law of Jesus: A Reflection on Matthew 5.13-20
One of the funny things about having an area of specialty is that you can have very specific, and to outside eyes, ridiculous, pet peeves. As someone with a background in linguistics, one of mine is when people read philosophical or theological meaning into the grammatical gender of a noun in languages like French or … Continue reading The Queer Holy Spirit?
One of the major roadblocks LGBTQ2S+ people experience in finding acceptance and welcome within their communities of faith is simply the perception that tradition is set in stone and cannot change. It’s that difficult combination of inertia and ‘case-law’ I talked about last post again. But as we saw with the case of eunuchs the … Continue reading Welcoming the Outcasts: Acts 10-11 as a Blueprint for Change
As a rule, Christians like to emphasize the ways in which the New Covenant revealed in and through Jesus differs from the Old. (This is particularly true of those coming from a Protestant background, since this was a particular emphasis of the Reformers.) And we are not wrong to do so — even if we … Continue reading What God Requires of Us: A Reflection on Micah 6.1-8 and Matthew 5.1-12
Matthew Root 